Reviews-driven App Quality
From the moment a digital product is finally released to the users, the results of what we have produced are frequently evaluated. An app can do a positive or a negative impact in the user’s life, regarding on how it influence his daily life.
Nowadays, mobile apps has much more relevance than web/desktop apps, because smart phones, smart watches and so many others gadgets are pervasive in our life.
On account of this pervasiveness, there’s millions of apps available at Google Play Store and Apple App Store to be downloaded on the devices of the millions of their active users.
So, when a user downloads your app, it means that it has been chosen to help him in one of his daily activities: entertainment, health, education, sports, work, finance, etc.
That’s when the relationship between a digital product and his new user starts and the app’s Quality will drive the engagement, retention and satisfaction in this relationship!
Let’s analyze some user reviews and try to understand how a practical Software Quality and Digital Product Quality approach applied to mobile apps can reflect on what users think about it.
What defines the Quality of an application?
You may be thinking “My app is good if it doesn’t crash, if it’s fast, if it has a nice UI, etc…”
In fact, you’re not wrong. If an app fits in most of the key-words in the figure above it can be considered a good one. But it’s necessary to use a unique system of measurement to be more assertive, that’s when the store reviews come in to play.
Measuring Quality through reviews
When ones download an app, he has 5 stars available for rating and a lot of characters to write a review, expressing his anger or joy, to represent his feelings and desires about the app.
So, the app’s review page can be a place full of mixed feelings about how much the app has been influencing positively or negatively the users life.
I’ve chosen some good examples of reviews, that can pass unnoticed if we don’t pay attention to what it really says. But first let’s start with some peculiar ones.
The peculiar ones
That reviews that make us think deeply about our app’s purpose...
Here, as we can see, Jesse really liked the app, because he’ve rated it with 5 stars but he has a peculiar way to express how much he have enjoyed the app. I hope he had helped other people souls from not being sucked 👀
Siva downloaded the Portable Fan app and thanks to that, the whole village said goodbye to the heat. It’s always awesome to see an app being useful making a good impact in a whole community… even if Siva and the whole village needs to be analyzed by a shrink, for believing in a virtual Portable Fan. 👀
Now that you have been introduced to what you usually find when you go to the review section of your app, let’s see some reviews that can be really treated as Quality indicators of our apps.
The disappointed ones
There are some negative reviews that may look like doesn’t have so much information in it, but some times we need to read the blurred lines between the rated stars and the reviews to understand more about how our app has been helpful to the users or not.
It’s a 1-star review, with just a few words, but its really clear that the user have been frustrated with the new version because something has changed. As i said, some times we need to read through the blurred lines, right?
So, why this user is unhappy with the new version?
Usually, this sort of reviews it’s strongly related to big changes in the information architecture along with some visual changes in the layout. But, it can be also related to when the app takes too long to load, when it crashes, when it becomes heavier in the device storage and so on.. So, we can’t ignore it. We need to investigate and try to gather more information to fix what’s wrong!
Here, even if the app has a good look (which means it has a nice UI) there’s something really bad happening that have made the user given up the app.
As we’ve noticed, the app has a big problem to keep the user session, so he needs to login every time, even when navigating between features when he is already logged. You can’t retain the users if your app has a good UI, but the users can’t use it without interruptions.
The best ones
Here you’ll see the best possible reviews, because they have rich information about how an app is really working and also about how the users are being influenced by a product.
At first glance, it looks like one of those peculiar reviews that we’ve analyzed. Its a really funny review, but it says A LOT about how the users have been using Tinder.
This person have been dealing with Tinder as a RPG game, and he’s definitely right to do it, because when you’re using it, you may bump into some monsters too… But let’s forget about my experience with Tinder and focus on what really matters. 👀
According to this review, find a match in Tinder is harder than winning at Dark Souls, and you can’t change the difficulty, no matter what you try. So..
- Is that true that only people who play in “Legendary mode” can win at Tinder?
- What’s the odds to some one find a match ?
- Do the users become more selective and take too long to choose someone?
- Both people who are looking for the love of their life and people who are just wanting to meet someone are they succeeding ?
As you can see, none of the questions above are directly related to the app. All of them are strictly related to the product that Tinder company delivers to the users in the form of an app. Sometimes, we have a good app, that works pretty well, but because of product issues, it doesn’t match the user’s expectations about it.
I’ve picked Tinder as an example, but judging by their success around the world, they’re delivering the necessary to be useful to their users and also improving the product, so people don’t need to be defeat inside a dungeon because of a legendary mode difficulty. If you want to know more about how relationship app companies deal with the “match problem”, go ahead and check this article that explains a Happn feature called Crush Time.
Here, Aaron Wolf have downloaded the app, and have discovered some subscription only contents, and instead of giving up on using the NBA app because of the paid restriction, he was really wanting to find a way to pay for a single game, which unfortunately it wasn’t supported yet. So, instead of taking a few weeks or months to add the “buy a single game” feature, they answered with a workaround to help him watch single NBA games until they develop this feature. Sometimes, just a simple useful answer can solve a problem and change what the users think about our app.
The app review’s page can be used as a strong customer relationship channel. So, the closer you are to your users, more likely you’ll be to deliver what they expect of your product and then turn a negative review into a 5-stars one!
We have seen that all the reviews analyzed so far tells a lot about how Quality has been handled in these application development process and also in the evolution of these products.
Mobile apps are quick to find and easier to uninstall. (Jason Arbor -App Quality: Secrets for Agile App Teams)
Apps that pay attention to Software Quality has a longer life with their users! Then, it’s necessary to think about how to improve the user experience with the app and deliver what they want your app to do.
Quality as a goal
There are two questions that are essential to always keep in mind, if we really want to deliver something with Quality.
Are we building the right product?
We need to be aware if our product is pointing right to the target or not. You will find out about it, if you branch this question into another ones, like: What “problem” we want to solve? Who is our target audience? Who are our competitors? What are our success metrics? and so on… Then if you build your product with Agile, on each iteration, the hypotheses will be validated and what was just an idea will start to become a real product, in an adaptive and incremental way.
Are we building the product right ?
Like the previous questions, this one can be branched into another ones:
- Are we using the best tech available during the development process?
- Do we trust in our code?
If you can answer positively these two questions, good job, you’re doing right! If you can’t, we need to understand why. So, it’s necessary to check if our architecture make it easy to keep the code maintainable, check if we’re using the project’s last available stable dependencies versions and also the last versions of Android/iOS APIs and, finally check if what we’re developing has been covered by automated tests that ensure the units, the integrations and also the business rules. Please, do not push untested code to production, because it will be as assertive as a stormtrooper shooting to a target in the dark…or simply, a stormtrooper shooting.
TL;DR
An app generates value to it’s users through features that achieve their expectations and also their goals with it. But, all efforts we had at the product discovering, adaptations and iterations to build an app that matches our target audience can be thrown away if it isn’t prepared to handle system exceptions, API failures, poor networks, storage space, different screen resolutions, memory usage and etc. If we don’t prepared it, our users will be frustrated because the app doesn’t do what what it should.
Therefore, Quality should be an important subject during the whole development process. So, we need a strategic Quality approach… which I’ll write about it in another post, because this one had become kinda bigger than I expected 😅
If the team succeed at build the right product and build the product right, it will be more likely to satisfy their users, because a well planned and well-built product tends to achieve assertively and resiliently the user’s goals with the app.
Then, this satisfied users will be so engaged with the app that they will write a review about it, expressing how good your app is and then you’ll receive your 5-star rating… or not.
But it doesn’t matter! If the reviews truly express the Quality of your app, then you’re good! 🤘
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